In 628 C.E., a young Jewish girl was taken captive after her tribe’s defeat by the Muslims at the Battle of Khaybar, in northern Arabia. Her mother was dead, along with her father, husband, brother, and uncle. Years earlier, her tribe, the Banu Nadir, had been expelled from Medina, once the most powerful Jewish tribe in Arabia and the last remaining sovereign Jewish presence on the peninsula. There, in Khaybar, she faced an enormous choice: Convert to Islam and marry the Prophet Muhammad, or remain a Jew and return to what was left of her people.
The young woman in question was a beautiful, high-status widow, the daughter of the tribe’s former chief, a sworn enemy of Muhammad. Her name was Safiyyah bint Huyayy, and she was revered in Islam as Muhammad’s Jewish wife.
Weeks earlier, some 1,400 Muslim fighters had launched a surprise attack on Khaybar’s fortresses, thrusting the Banu Nadir into conflict once again. The other two main Jewish tribes of Arabia, the Banu Qurayza and the Banu Qaynuqa, had already been massacred or expelled. The Banu Nadir themselves were substantially weakened: Their leader, Abu Rafi, had been assassinated by the Muslims during a Jewish festival a year earlier. They were ill prepared for a conflict of this scale. Worse, their Arab allies, the Ghatafan, never came to their aid. Rumors had spread that the Muslims would turn on them next. Fear for their homes and families caused many to turn back. Muhammad’s forces had also moved to cut off the route between Ghatafan and Khaybar, foreclosing the option entirely. The Banu Nadir were left to face the Muslim army alone.
Only six years before Khaybar, Muhammad had come from Mecca to Medina with a radical new societal order and, allegedly, the word of God. Though the main Jewish tribes signed a non-belligerency agreement with the Muslims, various conflicts and expulsions soon broke out over alleged treaty violations by the Jews. Desperate to be rid of Muhammad once and for all, Safiyyah’s father led a coup alongside the Banu Qurayza. When it failed, he and the Banu Qurayza were annihilated: Every man past puberty was beheaded in the market square, and women and children were sold into slavery.
Only a year later, her brother and uncle would be killed in the Battle of Khaybar. After the battle, the Banu Nadir’s women, horses, and weapons were distributed among the Muslims as spoils—her husband, Kinana, was tortured to death by the Muslims with hot iron for refusing to reveal where he hid the tribe’s treasure. So much wealth and weaponry were taken from the tribe that Ibn Umar, one of the Prophet’s early companions, would later recount, “We never ate our fill until we had conquered Khaybar!” Any Jews of Khaybar who remained became dhimmi agricultural laborers under Muslim authority. When Safiyyah was taken captive, she was first given to Dihya al-Kalbi, one of Muhammad’s companions. But when her beauty and status became known to the rest of Muhammad’s men, it was decided she should instead be brought to the Prophet himself.
Who were these Jews, and where did they come from? How is it that so many Jews today are unaware of their existence? And how much of their own history, beliefs, and identity can we recover? Many Jews remain unaware that the Prophet Muhammad had a Jewish wife. Her name means nothing to most Jews, despite how much she and the Jews of Arabia represent historically and culturally. Yet countless Muslim women are named after Safiyyah. She is a truly beloved figure in Islam, umm al-mu’minin, a mother of believers, woven into Islamic civilization’s very foundation despite being a minor figure there. Somehow, Muslims are far more educated in this part of our history than we Jews ourselves—episodes with the Jews of Arabia play a significant role in their theology, laws, and stories, while for us they’ve all but vanished.
If we are to uncritically accept the sources, Safiyyah’s choice to marry Muhammad isn’t hard to understand when considering the social realities of the time. In the past, marriage was often not simply a matter of romance or personal choice. Especially in times of war, marriage, even when coerced, could be a reasonable path for a woman to secure a semblance of dignity, protection, and safety, particularly when she no longer had any male familial protection. Safiyyah was a defeated captive with no independent means of survival and no male protection. Some modern Islamic interpretations seem to recognize this, and Muhammad’s act of marrying her is seen as an act of mercy and compassion.
Still, there is a devotional legend preserved in 9th- and 10th-century Islamic biographies about Muhammad to demonstrate how Safiyyah was divinely meant for him. After the Battle of Khaybar was over, Muhammad noticed a bruise on her face and asked where it came from. Safiyyah, then, recounted a dream she had while married to Kinana that the moon had fallen into her lap—but when she relayed it to her husband, he accused her of “longing for the king of the Hijaz” and struck her in the face so hard that he left a mark. Islamic tradition frequently associates the Prophet Muhammad with the moon’s radiance, so later Muslim commentators interpreted her dream as a clear omen that she would become the Prophet’s wife.
Another story, preserved by the early Muslim historian Ibn Ishaq, recounts the first time Safiyyah had ever learned about Muhammad. Once, when she was a child, long before her tribe was first expelled from Medina, news arrived that Muhammad had come to the city, claiming to be a prophet. Her father, Huyayy, went to see him before daybreak, but when he returned that evening, his face was pale with fear. When her uncle asked in a hushed voice, “Are you sure it was him?” and her father confirmed it, he asked how he felt towards him. “Hostility, by God, as long as I live,” her father allegedly replied. The story aligns perfectly with the Quranic verses that describe Jewish leaders “recognizing him [Muhammad as a Prophet] as they recognize their own sons,” yet “rejecting the truth out of envy.” There exists an abundance of stories about Safiyyah and the Jews of Arabia that were written to serve the needs of the early Muslim community.
Consequently, stories like these bring up one of the greatest difficulties of reconstructing the life of the Jews of Arabia. They are often central figures in the sources that preserve their history, but anyone who studies them encounters them exclusively through an Islamic lens. Because everything we know about them during the rise of Islam is through the Islamic texts, most stories about them either foreshadow or confirm the imminent arrival of the Prophet Muhammad. They are hollowed out from their own subjectivity, and any perspective in which they understood the turmoil around them is largely absent from the texts.
Yet, the Jews of seventh-century Arabia certainly did not understand themselves through the events of Islam. They understood and defined themselves solely as Jews, by their shared ancestry, laws, internal legal systems, and alliances. Many of their members served as scholars and spiritual leaders, including Safiyyah’s father. Jewishness, for them, was a comprehensive social identity, one that encompassed lineage, governance, and kinship. They understood themselves in these terms, and operated as civilizations in miniature. Perhaps if Safiyyah had relayed her dream about the moon to her tribe’s elders, they would have interpreted it through a Jewish perspective, radically different than the Muslims’. After all, the moon is also symbolic of the People of Israel, especially in its waxing and waning nature.
Also contrary to the Islamic perspective of jahiliyyah—the ignorant and barbaric state of Arabia before the revelation of Islam—pre-Islamic Arabia was a place bubbling with God. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and pagan Arabs were deeply rooted across the region, each with their own gods, worship customs, festivals, and traditions. The Jews were the most developed and literate among them; Jewish tribes in Medina also held a central role in promoting literacy, regularly instructing their community members and neighboring Arab tribes how to read and write in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. One famous story is the case of Zayd ibn Thabit, a young man from the tribe of Banu Najjar who eventually became the trusted scribe of the Prophet Muhammad. When Muhammad once saw a Jew with “two long sidelocks”—a distinctly Jewish, “foreign” hairstyle in Arabia—he instructed Zayd to learn Hebrew so he could independently read and write correspondence between the Prophet and the Jews. There is no doubt that his teachers were Jews. They held great cultural influence within Medinan society.
Along with that, they were landowners, warriors, poets, rabbis, farmers, merchants, and judges. They had businesses. They created houses of study. They were connected to other major religious Jewish centers in Babylonia and Palestine, but like most Jews in the diaspora, developed their own variations of belief and practice. Arabian Jews were very interested in mysticism and Judgement Day—especially in times of trouble—and like many other Jewish communities at the time, Jewish life in seventh-century Arabia was rich with Merkabah mysticism. According to Gordon Newby’s A History of the Jews in Arabia, Arabian Jews had their own interpretations of the biblical stories of Noah, Matetron, and Enoch, along with a deep fascination with magic, angels and demons, spells, potions and amulets. Along with growing sidelocks, older Jews typically left their grey beards and hair undyed, whereas Muslims were encouraged to use henna or other dyes to set them apart. These Jews were known to remove their sandals during prayer, while early Muslims were encouraged to pray in theirs to be distinct from them.
We can imagine how Safiyyah grew up in this world, perhaps eavesdropping on her father during important tribal meetings, or sitting around a fire with other children as her aunts or uncles told biblical stories about the Flood, or the splitting of the sea, the liberation of Jewish slaves from Egypt. She may have worn Hebrew protective amulets when she was a toddler, before she learned to speak. Jewish traders from faraway lands such as Yemen, Persia, and Babylonia might have visited her community or even sat with her family for a Shabbat meal. If so, they likely conversed in Aramaic or Hebrew, a bridge over any linguistic divide. Medina’s Jews spoke Arabic in daily life, but they also had their own distinct dialects. Classical scholars refer to a “Jewish language” that the Jews of Arabia spoke, different from Hebrew, which likely refers to a Jewish dialect of Arabic.
The Jewish Arabic dialect recorded in Islamic sources is usually portrayed matter-of-factly, but at times it carried a subtext of mistrust. There is a famous story of a group of Jews who greeted the Prophet by subtly bending their Arabic words to insult him: Instead of al-salamu alaykum, “peace be upon you,” they said al-samu alaykum, meaning “death be upon you.”
We know the Jews of Arabia were deeply religious. Indeed, spirituality was the center of their lives. They used the Jewish calendar, observed Yom Kippur, and fasted on Ashura in commemoration of God saving the Israelites from Pharaoh—most likely a distinct tradition among Arabian Jews at the time, given that it doesn’t correspond to any known biblical or rabbinical observance, but Islam later adopted it from them. Safiyyah likely fasted with her community on these holy days, in deep prayer, asking God for forgiveness and mercy.
According to Newby, they very likely viewed themselves as superior to their Arab neighbors because of their connection to the Bible. The great Samaw’al ibn Adiya—Safiyyah’s maternal grandfather—wrote in one of his many poems, whose topics spanned war, love, God, and religion, “Are we not the people of the sanctuary, to whom clouds descended which shaded them their whole journey?” The Temple in Jerusalem as their spiritual center, whose direction they faced as they prayed three times a day, the journey from Egypt, the story in the Torah of the supernatural canopy of clouds that shaded them until they arrived in the Promised Land, protecting them from the brutal heat and acting as both a compass and protection from enemies—these stories and traditions must have invigorated the Jews of Arabia, coupled with their agricultural successes, which to them must have only confirmed their self-perceived high status.
Therefore, the Arabian Jews revered and respected their Jewish laws. Among their most stringent interpretations of the law was related to family purity: When a woman was menstruating, Jewish families segregated her completely, and she would not eat with the family, touch utensils, or even remain in the same area. We know this because Muslims noticed this and asked the Prophet about it, and he confirmed that among the Jews, when a woman was on her monthly cycle, they would not eat or live with her in the house. We can imagine Safiyyah being educated by her mother before her first marriage in all matters regarding Jewish intimacy, and how to immerse in the mikvah, a pillar of every Jewish community throughout history. It is even likely that by the time Safiyyah encountered Muhammad, she might have been covering her hair in public, as required for married Jewish women.
She must have prepared for Shabbat each week and lit candles every Friday night. Shabbat, to Arabian Jews, was sacred and untouchable. Shortly before the Banu Qurayza’s destruction, one leader of the besieged tribe—in which Safiyyah’s father was executed with—briefly considered breaking the Sabbath to launch a surprise attack on Muhammad and his fighters, which was squarely rejected by everyone. They preferred to face certain death rather than violate the Sabbath.
Another option they considered, rather than convert to Islam or be taken as slaves, was killing their wives and children before fighting to the death. This, too, was rejected—but it’s very likely that this option of murder-suicide was inspired by their Jewish ancestors’ fight in Masada, according to historian M.J. Kister. At the very least, the descendants of the Jews who fled to Arabia after the Jewish wars superimposed the details of the siege of Masada onto the story of the siege of the Banu Qurayza. The Jews of Arabia were not insulated from the broader Jewish world, nor from the history of their civilization from which they understood themselves to descend.
How the Jews first arrived in Arabia remains a subject of debate, but most traditions—both Islamic and scholarly—trace their arrival to various waves of migration from Judea and the Levant. Some may have come to Arabia after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E. and stayed. Others likely fled southward after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., and joined those long-established communities there. The famed Islamic historian al-Sam’ani writes that the name of the Banu Nadir came from their ancestor al-Nazir—an Israelite associated with ascetic status who vowed not to consume wine, cut his hair, or come into contact with graves or corpses so as not to become impure. Perhaps he was a Judean man who migrated from Judea to Arabia during one of those great upheavals that scattered the Jewish people. If not after the Second Temple’s destruction, then perhaps after the Bar Kochva revolt six decades later.
This Nazir must have been a Temple priest, because along with her parents, Safiyyah’s entire tribe were Kohanim, descendants of the priestly caste of Aaron. We know this because once, two of Muhammad’s other wives, Hafsa and Aisha, bullied Safiyyah by saying they were more honored than her because they were the cousins and wives of the Prophet, and that she was just “the daughter of a Jew.” When Muhammad found Safiyyah crying, he told her to say to them, “How can you be better than me? My husband is Muhammad, my father is Harun [Aaron], and my uncle is Musa [Moses].”
It is this triad of identity that binds Safiyyah’s story to the sacred lineage that preceded Islam and the finality that completes it. Safiyyah, in the Islamic sources, is revered for her piety, beauty, intelligence, wisdom, and sensitivity. She is the symbol of Islam’s universal reach that faith, not birth, is the ultimate measure of honor. Through her story, Islam narrates its own moral legitimacy—that it is universal, inheriting and correcting earlier monotheistic practices, capable of absorbing the “other.” Islamic scriptures engage with Jewish concepts at a remarkable level, drawing from a world of ideas that historically predated Islam but were already fully developed in Judaism and which the Jews of Arabia understood well.
That Safiyyah and the Jews of Arabia are doors through which Islam explains itself is part of a broader pattern in Islam, in which Jewish concepts are woven into the fabric of Islamic self-understanding. Their very presence, refusal, then defeat exists to stabilize Islam’s own understanding of itself—the Jews’ very existence, in fact, forces Islam to explain itself. Why has the revelation “changed”? Why is there a new spiritual authority? Why is there a new community that now stands at the center of history? Why have the old rules changed? The Jews’ eventual defeat in the story of Islam only further fuels its own sense of cosmic truth and legitimacy. The Jewish tribes heavily influenced the religious landscape of Arabia and left an indelible imprint on the Islamic tradition, yet their story remains relatively unknown in the broader Jewish world.
Although Jewish presence in Arabia was ultimately destroyed—whether through expulsion, massacre, or conversion—the Jews of Arabia continue to live through Islam itself. And even as Jewish communities across Muslim lands were displaced and uprooted, most dramatically in the modern era, the Jews of Arabia continue to have an unmistakably powerful presence in Islamic imagination. Their existence continues to evolve through the political and religious movements of the modern Muslim world, where they appear in the writings of Islamist thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb and Abul A’la Maududi and in movements like that of Hamas, whose founding-era rallying cry—Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya’ud (Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return”)—is still chanted today. Safiyyah and the Jews of Arabia could not have imagined how contested and charged their story would become to Jews and Muslims 14 centuries later.
Source: Maia Zelkha, “Muhammad’s Jewish Wife,” Tablet Magazine, (October 15, 2026).
Photo: AI-generated illustration.